St. Adelaide of Italy

Adelaide was the daughter of Rudolph II of Burgundy and Bertha of Swabia. In a political settlement between her father and Hugh of Provence when she was but a year old, she was promised in marriage to Hugh’s son, Lothair.

Fourteen years later the young princess married Lothair II, then nominal King of Italy. Supported by the Italian nobility, real power in the kingdom was held by Berengar of Ivrea. The couple had a daughter, Emma who later married Lothair of France.

Lothair II died under suspicious circumstances in 950 and was succeeded by Berengar who tried to cement his usurped power by forcing a marriage between the young widow and his own son, Adalbert, whom he had crowned as his co-ruler. At her refusal, Adelaide was shut up in a castle on Lake Garda from which she made her escape with the assistance of a priest who dug a subterranean passage.

Through an emissary, Adelaide appealed to Otto I of Germany for protection. He attacked and conquered Berangar and, on Christmas day in 951, married Adelaide who was twenty years his junior. They had four children. In 962, Otto was crowned emperor in Rome and Adelaide empress.

When her son, Otto II, succeeded his father in 973, Adelaide at first exercised a powerful influence at court. But when Otto married the Byzantine princess, Theophano, the latter turned her husband against his mother, and the dowager was alienated from court. She sought refuge with her brother, Conrad, King of Burgundy, who, eventually, reconciled them.

At Otto II’s death in 983, both Theophano and Adelaide were appointed regents for his infant son, however, Theophano once more drove the Dowager Empress from the royal court into exile. But upon her daughter-in-law’s death in 991, Adelaide was again restored to the regency for her eleven-year-old grandson. Her energy being at this time of life much reduced, she was assisted by Willigis, Archbishop of Mainz. When the young Emperor Otto III came of age in 995, she was free to dedicate herself to works of charity, especially the foundation and restoration of religious houses.

Queen Adelaide had been a friend of Sts. Majoulos and Odilo, abbots of the great monastery of Cluny, then the center of monastic and clerical reform. She retired to the convent of Selta, near Cologne, which she had founded around 991, and though never professed, spent her last days in prayer. She died on December 16, 999.

Second Photo by: Vitold Muratov